On 12/21/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Criticisms have included that the suggested summaries simplify or distort the relevant policies, that the template is ugly (I agree :)), that the template is redundant considering the first sentence is often (but surprisingly rarely!) a summary of the policy, and that users may feel they have grasped a whole policy when they've only read a "powerpoint" bullet point version of it.
To copy what I said on [[Wikipedia talk:Semi-protection policyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Semi-protection_policy#One_line_summary #One line summaryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Semi-protection_policy#One_line_summary ]]:
It seems to me that the problem isn't that we need a box to sum things up but that we need better first lines. Just take the information which you would put in the box and instead put it in the first line. Then, you don't have a massive ugly box, you have all of the same information, and it removes the simplistic summary of policies (i.e. from WP:BANhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BAN, the useless and PowerPointhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint#Criticism_of_Powerpoint-eque *"Users may be banned for varying times. They may appeal, but must not circumvent the ban, so don't bait them or help them to try."*).
I feel that many people never read the guidelines, as there are too
many, and they're not well structured or organised together. By creating a single page with an accurate, concise summary of each guideline, a user can get a very good feel for not only how Wikipedia works, but also how the relevant policies and guidelines are structured, so they know where to go for more detail.
I agree: one of my main complaints about WP is that the Help stuffs aren't readily visible and hard to find (this becomes less of a problem once you discover Meta, but hey!). However, we already have the one-liner page: it's at [[Help:Contents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents]]. This handy little page is easily accessible if you use the vastly superior Classic skin (it's right underneath the link to your talk page), but is somewhat more hidden if you don't. If it became more obvious then it would alleviate some of the problems you're talking about (IMHO).
For those alternatives and reasons, I don't think that this box is necessary.
-- [[User:Blackcap]]